Seagate Officially Unveils Solid-State Drives

Seagate Technology, the world’s largest maker of hard drives, on Monday officially announced its first solid-state drive family named Pulsar. The new product line is aimed specifically at OEMs producing storage solutions for applications that require serious reliability. The announcement comes after over three months of commercial SSD shipments by the company.

“Seagate is optimistic about the enterprise SSD opportunity and views the product category as enabling expansion of the overall storage market for both SSDs and HDDs. We are delivering on our strategy to provide our customers with the exact storage device they need for any application, regardless of the component technology used, with the Pulsar drive, and you can expect additional products in the future from Seagate using a variety of solid state and rotating media components” said Dave Mosley, Seagate executive vice president of sales, marketing and product line management.

According to the company, the Pulsar SSD delivers the necessary performance, reliability, and endurance to match the application environments of enterprise blade and general servers. It achieves a peak performance of up to 30 000 read IOPS and 25 000 write IOPS, 240MB/s sequential read and 200MB/s sequential write. Since it is based on SLC flash, it Pulsar drives can board with improved reliability and endurance and helps provide a 0.44% annualized failure rate (AFR) rating with a 5-year limited warranty.

“To deliver and serve the enterprise SSD marketplace effectively, it is critical for suppliers to understand the needs of their storage system customers with respect to design, manufacturing, supply chain delivery, and support. With its well-established OEM and eco-system relationships and a long history of serving global storage OEMs, Seagate is in a unique position to fortify its leading enterprise storage position with its entry into the enterprise solid state storage market,” said Dave Reinsel, IDC group vice president.

Seagate began shipping Pulsar units to select OEMs for revenue in September 2009. The Seagate Pulsar SSD is available to general OEM customers for qualification.

“The enterprise SSD market is now primed and well-positioned for growth from both a revenue and unit perspective, with Gartner estimating unit growth to double and sales to reach $1 billion for calendar year 2010. Superior enterprise SSDs provide transformational capabilities when optimized in storage and server environments,” said Joseph Unsworth, research director at Gartner.